Electronic mail or e-mail is a communication scheme which has acquired increasing acceptance due to its use on personal computers. Paging has been common in connection with wireless paging systems and has involved the transmission of small, simple messages. Telephones have traditionally been used to communicate audio signals between users. The integration of audio signals and message signals has, to come extent, been provided by eqipment employing an analogue display services interface (ADSI) protocol. Such protocol was established to enable a stored program computer system (SPCS) to remotely control a visual display device such as liquid crystal display (LCD) included in customer premises equipment (CPE). The ADSI protocol has provided for certain extensions which allow users to employ the protocol for features other than simply controlling a visual display device. However, none has been used to communicate e-mail and pages.
Manufacturers such as Uniden and Phillips have attempted to provide data transfer functionality between an SPCS and customer premises equipment, however, these typically use a high speed data mode which requires synchronization time and can have a net effect of being slow as seen by the user. In addition, equipment to facilitate the use of such a data mode can be expensive.
As the ADSI protocol has already provided for communication between an SPCS and customer premises equipment, use of the ADSI protocol extension for e-mail and paging is desirable as systems are already in place to communicate messages according to the ADSI protocol. What would be desirable, therefore, would be a device which uses extensions to the ADSI protocol to allow a telephone user to send and receive pages and e-mails at a telephone, in conjunction with a messaging platform. Freferably, an SPCS can query customer premises equipment to determine whether or not it has room to store an e-mail or page, an SPCS can download an e-mail or page, and an SPCS can query customer premises equipment to see it is has a message to be uploaded. In addition, preferably an SPCS can signal customer premises equipment to assume a high speed data mode which uses a high speed data transfer protocol to upload information from the CPE to the SPCS, when desired. The present invention addresses these and other needs.